Shiv Integer

An exhibition by Julien Deswaef and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

Every day, Shiv Integer randomly selects 3D printable objects available on a website, assembles them into sculptures and posts them back online.

Shiv Integer’s particularity? It’s actually an automatic software robot – a bot – created by Julien Deswaef and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez. Is it art or spam? The 3D printing community remains divided on the question.

For this first Shiv Integer exhibition, the artists will show a selection of the bot’s sculptures materialised through 3D printing, as well as a visualisation of the online debates it fostered.

Thingiverse is the biggest online 3D-Print community and a vast archive of user-made models - full of knick-knacks and engineering parts. Rummaging through this collection, Shiv Integer picks objects at random to conjoin into sculptures and gives them apt word-salad names such as "disc on top of an e-juice golf".

The process follows a lineage of Dadaist readymade and chance art, but also explores the authorship-inheritance of Creative Commons licensing (which makes each designer of the original 3D models a co-author of the final assemblage). Lastly, it performs an archiving of an Internet subculture, taking snapshots of 3D-Print culture across the whole Thingiverse database.

The bot ran anonymously with only a vague FAQ explanation. Thingiverse users either love or hate the bot; it's provoked hundreds of comments ranging from fan poetry to hate mail, and sparked a long debate over if it makes art or spam. User's binding stake in authorship made them fiercely active, forming a key facet of Shiv Integer.